Mark Frost and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks is a phenomenon. I wasn’t old enough to experience its first run while it was on television in the 90s, but when I did encounter it (somewhere between sophomore/junior year of college) I imagine I did what every Twin Peaks viewer did before me: I fell in love.

Television is the great seducer. We’ve seen this played out over history with the introduction of it into homes around the 1950s to its ability to adapt to Internet Culture (with companies like Netflix, Hulu, etc.) in order to create codependencies. Its goal is to enrapture us, to warp our realities, to trick us into believing that the lives we see on screen are the kinds of lives we live. TV makes us feel more interesting. And to a certain extent this is what the first two seasons of Twin Peaks does, at least in a David Lynch kind of way. We fall in love with the lives of Donna Hayward and James Hurley and Audrey Horne and Bobby Briggs and Richard Horne and (especially) Dale Cooper. This eccentric town in north Washington is both foreign and familiar to us in its smallness, campiness, and otherworldliness.

But where Twin Peaks deviates is in the glossy veneer of (un)reality that many shows before/after it are coated in during post-production. Instead, what Twin Peaks does very early in its narrative is a sloughing of that televisional veneer. It begins with characters' reactions to the news of Laura Palmer's death. The melodrama is painstakingly obvious, and yet it isn’t unreal. Who wouldn’t wail hysterically at finding out their daughter has been murdered? Who wouldn’t run out of class when the news of a best friend’s death has been announced over the intercom for the entire student body to hear? These are the kinds of things that speak to Lynch's genius. His ability to subtly shift reality in order to bring an absolute awareness to it. When Sarah Palmer is absolutely losing her shit in episode one, we take notice instead of just accepting her sorrow as we would in a different show where that sorrow isn’t accentuated and overdramatized, where an actor is heralded for her "authentic performance." It’s because of the melodrama that we take notice. This is what drew me to Twin Peaks back in college. And it’s what made me fall in love with show.

Now that the second run (which aired on Showtime) has ended, I want to express my thoughts/fan theories/criticisms here. Beginning with: how the hell is Annie?

At the end of the second season back in 1991 we’re introduced to Annie Blackburn, a character meant to be the love interest for our hero Dale Cooper. It’s peak Twin Peaks romance stuff. You have Gordon Cole expressing what looks a hell of lot like love toward Shelly Johnson (now Shelly Briggs) in what I think is one of the most authentic moments of television: Cole, being hard of hearing and having to use a hearing aid device, exclaims that he doesn’t need the device to hear Shelly’s voice and proceeds to fawn over her. It’s quite beautiful. Anyway, at the same moment Cole is gushing over Shelly, you have Coop falling head over heels for Annie. And over the course of the final six episodes the two become extremely close. In true Lynchian fashion, Annie wins the Miss Twin Peaks Beauty Pageant, which puts her in mortal/spiritual danger. She’s taken to the Black Lodge, where Coop chases after her and becomes trapped for the next 25 years. At the end of the second season we’re left with that haunting image of Coop’s doppelgänger bleeding and laughing and asking, “How’s Annie?”

That question was for me always more than just about Annie. It was really, “How’s Coop?” But still, what Lynch did for us at the end of that second season with Annie Blackburn was to show us a side of Coop we hadn’t yet seen. A side that boyishly loved a woman he barely knew, enough to sacrifice his soul for her. And so, we really want him to be happy, we want him to have saved Annie, to have ended up with her.

In the series’ second run, that question is both answered and not. We never see Annie. She’s never even mentioned. Which, for a show like Twin Peaks and a director/writer like David Lynch, isn’t completely out of the ordinary. What we do get a long and drawn out display of Cooper navigating his way out of/through the Black Lodge. Cooper finally emerges from the Black Lodge fully himself, not missing a beat, just as kind as ever, seeing the best in everyone. And for one glorious moment, all is right in the world of Twin Peaks. However, the final episode tears this all down. Cooper is back in some alternate reality where he’s known as Richard and he’s trying to get Laura Palmer back home. In all of this, there’s no Annie. Annie, the one who appeared to Laura and told her to write in her diary, “The good Dale is in the Lodge, and he can’t leave.” The woman we loved to watch Coop love. The woman whose kidnapping resulted in Cooper’s being locked in the Lodge for 25 years. She’s completely absent in the second run. Why, David?

How the hell is Annie?

I think we can try to answer this in a myriad of different ways. One being that she served her purpose for the overall narrative and when we last see her in the hospital bed, having the ring stolen from her by the nurse, she has completed her own circle within the world of Twin Peaks; that she is now somewhere living her life trying to forget about the experience she had in the Lodge. And that’s fine.

Another way we might answer this question is to think about Janey-E, the wife of Dougie Jones, who we learn is a manufactured being used for the purpose of bringing Cooper back from the Lodge. Janey-E is not Annie in any regard, but she does share a few similar attributes:

They both love men that share the same physical body of Dale Cooper.
They are both sisters of women who have an established presence in the show (Annie is Norma Jennings sister, Janey-E is Dianne’s).
They both serve Cooper (damn fine) desserts and coffee, which is super important in the history of this character.
They share a relation to the Black Lodge.

At the end of the series, another Dougie is manufactured and sent home to Janey-E and Sonny Jim, a sort of happily-ever-after ending for the Las Vegas family. Are we to read into that that in some alternate universe, Dale returns to Annie? I’m not so sure. It seems to me that what we are supposed to gather from this third installment of Twin Peaks is that evil spreads, like ink in water, until what was once innocent and pure becomes evil itself. That the once eccentric town of Twin Peaks in northern Washington, a town where evil was beginning to manifest itself in the quiet lives of its inhabitants, can become a place where children are run down in the streets by trucks, where fathers abuse and murder their daughters, where all of the good can be strangled out until there is nothing but the darkness of evil.

This is why we’ll never know the answer to, “How’s Annie?” She’s been blotted out, her memory, her kindness, her innocence. There isn’t a place for her in this new universe. Or at least, that’s what I’ll keep telling myself